WoW is a game that caters for both casuals and hardcore, but generally that definition reflects how many nights/days per week one raids, or plays at least.

For some of us the moniker of casual also refers to the size of the blocks of playable time. For instance, I am more likely to have 2 or 3 blocks of 1/2 hour per week than 1 block of 1.5 hours. This can make things difficult in WoW, because as much as people like to tell you they can beat the game 1/2 hour at a time, I just don’t seem to find the same magic.

What I find in reality is there are only a few games where one can truly play in short sharp blocks, and even then time can get away.

For instance my wife is a hardcore solitaire player. Pretty much the only game she plays is solitaire, good old stock standard Windows solitaire.

Solitaire is a game you can knock over in 5 minutes. Extremely casual. Waiting for the kettle to boil, don’t watch it, play a quick hand.

However my experience is that she will be just one more minute, just one more hand, just one more hour… and this IS a game you can easily walk away from.

My Time Cap

My wife also likes to watch a little bit of TV, although she will deny that, stating she only watches it to spend time with me. Thing is I am not a fan of the cooking and gardening shows, and Desperate Housewives leaves me feeling a tad less masculine by the final credits – especially if I enjoy the episode.

Occasionally when she is watching her shows I sneak off for a quick WoW session. Just 1/2 hour or an hour. She will call out 5 minutes before the show ends so I can log off and shut down, then call out from bed to tell me I am 1/2 hour over time, then nothing… Till I look at the clock and it’s now 12.30 am or worse, she calls me out in the morning.

Now this isn’t a post about time management. I have access to a plethora of alarms, including in game alarms.

This is a post about WoW as a time sink, or more to the point an angry hungry all devouring demon from the plane of existence that thrives on lost moments…

Where the time goes

So let’s look at the lost moments and what they really add up to:

Getting Started and Packing Up
Starting PC and logging on 5-10 minutes (likewise turning it off can chew a surprising amount of time if turning it off involves doing some data uploads, or emailing screenshots etc).

I appreciate most of you probably don’t consider this to be play time… to be honest neither do I… but for my wife, when she hears “1 hour”, she hears 1 hour from the time you leave my side to the time you return with the PC shut down. Not, you have 1 hour of play time, not including start up/shutdown, updating addons, checking emails, scanning auction house…

Auction House

AH – Using Auctioneer on Aman’Thul Alliance side, it takes 20-30 minutes to do a full scan + another 15-20 minutes to process the data. Admittedly there are usually 550-600odd pages to scan. On top of this there is the posting… which hopefully is batch posting, cause you don’t want to sit there all night.

Mailbox clear

30 seconds – 5 minutes Depends what’s there, how many full mailboxes there are, how many items bug out. etc

Bank check

30 seconds + travel time. This is assuming I am not intending to hunt anything down and withdraw it…

Steady On Gnome, that’s a bit rich!

That’s a bit extreme, my AH business runs itself, even while I’m sleeping.. it never takes me more than 5 minutes a week.

I stumbled across KiwiRed’s blog post So How Long Do Glyphs Take? and it really rang a bell. Even cutting your product down to single range doesn’t necessarily mean a 5 minute AH scan and the job is done.

So, 94 minutes later, that’s how it’s done. That’s 61 minutes where I have to pay attention to the computer, and 33 minutes (while batch-posting goes on) where I can do other activities

Dailies

Two in 1/2 hour best case, especially if travel or fishing are involved.

WSG

When I have time to burn… Instant entry and 20 min fight. When I don’t – 10 min wait and 40 fight.

Quick instances and raids

10+ minutes to form party, enter instance, buff and start. 20 minutes for needless wipes. 30 minutes for the instance. 3 minutes to recover from Dalaran lag when porting back in, 2 minutes to hand in quests, 5 minutes to swim through the lag and repair, restock etc ready for next time.

Compensating for lost time

Now I know the time is going to go.. please don’t pst me for a Port, or god forbid say hello to me… you just added another 10 minutes to my session.

I try to compensate by carefully planning out before each gaming session everything I

need to do

want to do, and

could do

I try to get through this list… yes I do include the dailies I want to do, whether I want to scan the AH etc. If I hit a daily quest giver, and it’s one I want to do, but have no time, I grab it, record it and schedule it into a future gaming session.

Am I alone?

I know that back when I had time to read through the Auctioneer forums, people would frequently question the Goblin inhabitant’s claims of ezymode gold farming on 15 minutes a day.

I’m just wondering, do you manage to achieve herculean amounts of activities in Gnome sized blocks of time?

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11 Responses

Can give you one tip to reduce your scanning time. If you open the auction window, type /aadv getall it dumps the whole mess of data into your auctioneer in a couple of minutes, rather than by laborious scanning.

I suggest not turning off your computer. Try standby instead. I only turn mine off if Windows wants to run updates. That cuts the startup to a minute or so, including typing in the password.

Or if you can leave your computer on, run auctioneer when you’re away from your computer, such as while sleeping or start it in the morning before you leave for work. The scan time seems excessive though. Worst I’ve seen is half an hour for a totally fresh scan/process.

How to make gold fast: exploit the AH and produce nothing. See, producing things; crafting or farming or questing, those take time. It’s much faster to take the gold of those who actually produce things.

Tell her standby is like turning it off completely except better. While it does still use a bit of power, you save all the time of the startup and shutdown so you don’t have to run the computer as long. Think of it like when you’re waiting for a really long train; there’s a point where it’s a savings to turn off your engine and start it up again, but before that you’d be using more gas than just leaving the car idling.

The quick scan feature in Auctioneer works best if you are in a secluded area – IF and SW are right out. Port yourself over to Darn or Exodar to get a better success. I use it in Silvermoon and never have a problem (although I’m using a newer version of Auctioneer and use the little fast-forward button instead of a /command.)

If you have items that you post at roughly the same price and your scan data is from within the last day or three, you can post items on the Appraiser tab while the scan is running.

Cons:
Longer Path from Bank to AH (If things you are selling is not on your mail box)
(If you had stock up on bank, you should be IF/SW anyway)

Try use the batch post function if you don’t have already, it saves a lot of time. (I list about 200-500 auctions a night, that really help me a lot)

(for anyone that didn’t notice, the mailbox can only be fetched once per 60 secs, which means, after you fetched x mails, the x new mails under the 50 mail limit, need to wait till the time limit is over.)

To be honest, it really surprised me when I first actually timed it – I’ve made some adjustments to my routine that cut down the time a little, but I’m probably spending even more time with glyphs due to some insistent competition in the market at the moment.

The suggestion of moving AH toons to Exodar (or Darnassus, which I find more aesthetically pleasing than Exodar) has some merit – it’s a pity there isn’t an AH in Shattrath, as that’s pretty much a dead city these days, and could use the traffic.

(As an aside, the 50-mail limit is really beginning to irritate me; it’s a pity there isn’t an option to work around it, like the getall option in Auctioneer… And crafting is actually kind of broken when you’re making anything in bulk. It’s bad enough with inks – my record is an 18 minute run of Inks of the Sea – but filling up low-volume items like glyphs can be quite annoying, having to press “Proceed” a hundred times 3 or 6 or 9 seconds apart… /rant)

since i am living with the consequences of feeding the “hungry all devouring demon from the plane of existence that thrives on lost moments…” (lol), the pain of your commentary is very fresh. i was with you on every point — even your time estimates are similar to mine — until you hit the point about time it takes to run instances. my pain today comes from last night’s daily heroic, which was heroic nexus. it was 9:30, and some guildies asked if i wanted to join them. normally, i need to be thinking about bed soon at that point, but i’m trying to be a good guildy, so i said “sure” – i mean, it’s the DAILY, an easy run – how long could it take?

oh, about 3 hours! we were all so tired we didn’t even finish. we wiped on freakin’ ormorok the big stamping rock dude three times before giving up for the night. no idea why it happened, everyone has a bad night…. but where did three hours GO??

and here i am with 5 hours sleep and a full day ahead of me. sigh! i hope that hungry devouring demon is happy….